Sarah Dowling
Sarah Dowling
Biography
Sarah Dowling is the author of Entering Sappho, DOWN, and Security Posture, which received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. A literary critic as well as a poet, Sarah’s first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize. Sarah is an assistant professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
Poetics Statement
“Entering Sappho is a portal into history – the bits that are meant to be meaningful to a person like me, as well as those that are repugnant. Entering Sappho is taking on a series of voices, versions of the ancient poetess and traces of the town. Entering Sappho is addressing history and its daughter colony, the present.
Entering Sappho is a silly ritual. When you’re driving to the coast on Highway 101, you come to the sign, stop, and take a picture. Entering Sappho is how you pay tribute to the original lesbian and to the generations of queers who’ve also paused here to photograph themselves. Entering Sappho is a moment of gleeful excitement. Cars zoom past, going much faster than seems possible. It’s a little scary, but entering Sappho is also hilarious. Picture the hand gestures, how people pose, decade after decade, in front of this unwitting monument.
Entering Sappho is digging into the history of a settlement founded in 1895, just before the garbage-dump discovery of the papyrus versions of Sappho’s poems. This is a town with few textual traces, without any standing physical remnant. Entering Sappho is reading the slim, self-published memoirs of former child-settlers, their fantastical memories of running through the forest, their naive recollections of who was armed and who was bleeding. Entering Sappho is listening to the oral histories held in the Special Collections at the University of Washington and reading through the newspaper clippings from the Seattle Public Library. Entering Sappho is an engage-ment with desperate, indulgent, and condescending nostalgia. It documents a wish for this special kind of small-town life.”
Sample of Poet's Work
CLIP
Monday, May 15, Sappho, wa –
a logging chapter is closed. Those
country maidens were good riders,
flowers blooming in an old bathtub,
cows grazing in an orchard. Garments
wet as they should be. Across the dirt
road, peasant girls on the front porch,
a town of five houses – oh, anyone
would want
to live
in the fenced area nearby. Anyone,
wet dress around her feet.
Her dress about her ankles, an old
bathtub. In the front yard, horses
munch grass. What wench, country-
fried at the side of the highway, has
electricity, television, a telephone – oh,
it’s for the birds! What rustic girl
plans to enter her prize quarter-
horse in races this summer? She’s
never known anything but logging
trucks, she doesn’t even draw her
gown across her feet.
Water flowers bloom. Country girls
turn north at Sappho, go to Pysht,
spend time darning holes in wool
socks and wondering, why would
anyone pull rags
over her ankles?
What girl wants to live in nearness
to fishing? What country girl is un-
spoiled nature?
Young mothers by choice, they
hear about it three days later. They
still don’t pull the cloth over
their feet.